By Matt Lombardi, global head of customer experience strategy at ServiceNow and Jill Helmle, senior manager of customer experience strategy at ServiceNow
If you’re curious how hot a commodity customer feedback is these days, look no further than your inbox, where product-review requests and customer-experience surveys arrive early and often. But too often an email survey is where a company’s customer-data effort begins and ends.
Though organizations are keen to know more about what customers think about them, few have a survey-management strategy or set of best practices to turn that feedback into actionable insights. This absence is a crucial oversight that can have costly financial and legal consequences. Noncompliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when reaching out to customers and storing their data, for example, can cost some violators well into the tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars.
The prime consideration in conducting survey management should be customer experience and satisfaction. Over-polling, or polling without an organized method, can leave customers feeling harassed and may damage your relationship with them if you don’t respond to negative feedback promptly. Both McKinsey and Perceptyx found that not following up with dissatisfied customers can have a powerfully negative impact on the relationship. Bottom line: never send a survey unless you are ready to take action.
Customer feedback is a powerful gift. Here are four critical best practices that will strengthen your survey management practice and help you avoid costly missteps.